Candlestick Name May End Sunday / Vote set for tomorrow on deal with 3Com

Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Wednesday, September 6, 1995

San Francisco's Candlestick Park will be history as soon as Sunday if the city's Recreation and Parks Commission approves a plan this week to change the name to 3Com Park in return for $1 million.

The name change is part of a bigger deal that could net the city as much as $4 million over the next four years. The first phase goes before the commission at a special meeting set for 2 p.m. tomorrow.

If it passes, new signs will go up immediately and the 49ers will open their home season at 3Com Park Sunday afternoon.

Though 3Com is not exactly a household word, the Santa Clara firm has a considerable reputation in the computer business. The company is only 16 years old, but it is big, tough and aggressive.

It had revenues of $1.3 billion in the 1995 fiscal year, and in July it swallowed up the Massachusetts based Chipcom Corp. for $775 million in stock. It was 3Com's tenth and largest buyout in three years. The company has been growing by 30 percent a year, and its stock has nearly tripled in value in a single year.

The company is the second largest in the $10 billion a year networking industry, which makes equipment that links computer systems together -- a sort of plumbing system for computers.

At the time 3Com was expanding in all directions, San Francisco was figuring out how to pay for $26 million in repairs and upgrades to Candlestick Park to make it ready for the Super Bowl in January, 1999.

The park needs a new field, a bigger press box, new locker rooms for the players, electrical repairs, and work on the luxury boxes, according to the deal between the city and the National Football League.

If approved, 3Com Stadium will be the name for all seasons, including the baseball season. Since the city owns the park, it also owns the name. Though most of the improvements are required for the football Super Bowl, the baseball Giants will also benefit from the new field and the new locker rooms.

Jim Lazarus, who is Mayor Frank Jordan's special projects director, came up with the idea of selling the park's name.

The concept is not new -- Lazarus notes that the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis is now called the RCA Dome, the Forum in Inglewood is now the Great Western Forum, and that the home of the Mighty Ducks hockey team in Anaheim is Arrowhead Pond, after a bottled water company.

The price for the right to name the facility after a private firm ranges from $290,000 a year for the Target Center, a Minneapolis arena, to $2 million a year for the Arrowhead Pond. The deal Lazarus is putting together calls for $4 million for five years of 3Com Park. "It's an all cash deal," Lazarus said. The first part is the sale of the first year for $1 million, the second a more complex multiyear contract through the turn of the century.

But if the short-term deal passes the Recreation and Park Commission Thursday, signs will go up that say "Welcome to 3Com Park," and Candlestick Park, named for nearby Candlestick Point in 1960, will be only a memory.